About two-thirds of companies using social customer service claim to respond in 4 hours or less, and 26% within a day, according to October 2012 findings by SocialMediaToday, in cooperation with SAP and the Pivot Conference. Customers who want a quicker answer to their questions might want to think about picking up the phone. Results from an Ifbyphone study [PDF] released in November indicate that a majority of top retailers answer inbound local calls in less than 30 seconds and corporate-level calls in under 90 seconds.
The element of expectation does play into the social media and phone responsiveness comparison, to be sure. Consumers aren’t yet conditioned to receive immediate responses via social media, but they do expect to reach representatives by phone extremely quickly. In fact, an Ifbyphone study released in May found that 84% of respondents reported being either likely or very likely to do business with a brand if they responded to a phone call in less than a minute, while just 53% indicated that likelihood if they had to wait for longer than a minute, a 58% difference. Read the rest at MarketingCharts.
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